Organic Rankings and Click Through Rates- What you Need to Know?

Often when running an SEO campaign, we witness experts are trying to improve organic rankings to get more traffic. But have you thought how much traffic the site receives if it is on first page? Do organic results actually contribute to increasing your traffic? You need to know even after getting top position on first page of Google results page, why you aren’t getting the expected CTR for your ranking. These are some of the hard to answer questions, which you need to consider deeply so as you can find out do CTR always results in organic traffic? and how do they impact the organic results? Before taking through the process of understanding the complicated relationship between CTR and organic traffic, it necessary for you to know what do these terms mean. CTR is the percentage of Clicks your sites receive on the search engine results page (SERP) while organic traffic means traffic that comes to your website from unpaid search results.

Understanding the complexities between the two:

Some SEO professionals believe that by targeting relevant and long tail keywords, your job is done when you rank on top of Google results page. But the bitter truth is one even if you have succeeded in getting 1,000 impressions for your website, your efforts would go in vain if the CTR is Zero. For example: If you have received total 1,000 impression out of which only 20 are unique clicks (number of individual clicks on your site) so, 20/1,000 * 100, your CTR would be 2%. This indicates that there are only 2% of prospective customers who have shown interest in your site. This isn’t bad still OK, but the sales you’re getting are still small. There is not standard rule that this much percent of CTR would be good for your site, but it is desirable that it should as high as possible. If your site has number one ranking position on first page of Google considering your CTR is 10%, then this is extremely a worrying sign for you as the percentage should be much more than this.

By just improving the CTR, your site can get more visitors and you wouldn’t have to worry about spending your energy on looking out for various strategies to increase organic rankings. In order to get to the core of poor CTR, you need to analyze you search query report through Google Webmaster Tools. You need to look at improving on key points like making changes to title tags and meta descriptions, incorporating rich snippets, Google authorship markup, using keywords in metas, keeping title tags and meta descriptions short to 70 characters and 165 characters respectively.

From SEO perspective, click through rate lets you know how effective your campaign is and Google considers it as a ranking factor. If your website appears on the first page but fails to get maximum clicks then, Google has every reason to push your site down. With just a high CTR, any site can come on the first page that previously was listed on third or fourth page.

So, now you know SEO isn’t about just getting organic ranking for your site but click through rate also matters, which often becomes an isolated factor when doing Search Engine Optimization.